In Club Amour, a triptych of works by Pina Bausch and Boris Charmatz, performed by Pina’s Tanztheater Wuppertal, now led by Boris, explores our universal need to seek out other bodies to cling to and how this longing, this thirst for connection, can lead to manipulation, dependence, isolation and despair.
Adelaide has had an enduring love affair with modern dance innovator Pina Bausch. We are the home of Australian Dance Theatre, which was once led by Bausch collaborator Meryl Tankard. It is fitting, then, for Adelaide Festival to be the location for the Australian premiere of Bausch’s seminal 1978 work, Café Müller. The set, inspired by her childhood spent in her family’s post-World War 2 restaurant, is littered with tables and wooden chairs; it’s bounded by glass walls and a rotating door. Rotating doors are appropriate, because Bausch’s choreography, soundtracked by arias by Purcell, is underpinned by repetition; round and round the dancers go, in loops, questing for others, eyes closed, sometimes finding the warmth but then often being left cold.
Café, which reflects on Bausch’s observation of the struggles of customers to make sense and find their way in the world after a great upheaval, is so loaded with meaning and movement, often at all corners of the stage simultaneously. It gives cause to examine gender roles, domestic abuses, and how human connection drives all of what we do. It’s a work rich with meaning, deserving of repeated viewings. With Tanztheater director Charmatz’s opening pairs of work, Aatt enen tionon, and herses, duo, there are singular focuses, as trios and duos of semi-naked and naked bodies perform while surrounded by an audience which stands on the Festival Theatre’s stage.
Aatt enen tionon. (attention), which is bookended by blaring tracks by PJ Harvey, who just headlined WOMAD, was written during the AIDS epidemic. A trio of dancers, stripped entirely naked from the waist down, brutally slam themselves against their confined wooden floors while stacked, one-atop-the-other in a tower. They hear each other banging, or sometimes see a limb dangled over the edge, but they can never reach each other. The 40 minute work of such vulnerable nakedness, can feel uncomfortable, but maybe that’s the emotion we are called to pay attention to; how the AIDS epidemic isolated, imposed barriers to keep us apart from each other.In herses, duo, though, a pair of naked dancers scarcely lose touch with each other for an instant, representing the phases of love. At times one dancer will turn away from the other, at others they will carry their partner, lift them up, but it’s reciprocal. They learn to move in synch with their lover while exposing themselves entirely. It is a work of great intimacy and beauty. Like love itself, Club Amour can be confounding and challenging but ultimately it expands your reality.
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